It is the year 2040, and the past 15 years have not been kind. The world is starting to fall apart. The climate is deteriorating, resources are being exhausted, and there are more people to feed every year. Technology is advancing, but not fast enough to save everyone.

Most of the Free Cities are run on radically libertarian or even anarcho-capitalist principles. The first Free Cities experimented with indentured servitude, and this rapidly developed into widespread slavery. By now, the Free Cities collectively are a fundamentally slaveowning society and maintain a thriving slave trade that feeds off the terrible conditions in parts of the old world. The old world countries have generally turned a blind eye, or have even been complicit in the trade.

The Free Cities are located wherever the rule of law is weak enough or permissive enough to allow a small area to secede, and where founders can afford to buy an area on which to build. A few Free Cities have been carved out from old world cities. Urban decay has left the hearts of many cities ripe for this. Many old world countries resist this kind of secession, but this rarest, smallest, and densest kind of Free City can offer its surrounding nation a great deal of economic advantage.

As the old countries crumble and technology stagnates, the gap between rich and poor increases. In order to continue living a good life without having their property taken by the mob, many of the wealthy and powerful come together to form 'Free Cities.' These are new cities on undeveloped land, in remote areas, or even afloat, fully free of any allegiance or law. These new cities are built on new ideas, with most designed as futuristic, self-contained 'arcologies.' An arcology and everything in it is usually owned by a single person. And you have now become one of those single people at a young age.

Your arcology is named Heaven. It's a huge spire whose structure and outer shell gleams in the sunshine. Its bulk towers above the city around it; it is part of a cluster of arcologies that form a Free City in the midst of an old world urban area located in western eueurope. At the top of the spire is your penthouse.